How to List Every Terminal Command on Mac OS

Have you ever wanted to know what every single possible terminal command was on a Mac? You can list every terminal command available by turning to the command line. What you’ll see is a significant list of terminal commands with over 1400 possible commands to investigate and use, many of which are either helpful or powerful as we regularly cover with our command line guides. Of course many of the commands listed will have no relevance to the average user, but it can still be helpful to be able to navigate through the list and investigate each command and its respective purpose.

We’ll show you how to list every single terminal command available on a Mac, as well as how to get an explanation and details on each specific command that is shown.

How to Show Every Terminal Command Available in Mac OS

This trick will reveal every single possible terminal command available to Mac OS and Mac OS X. It works in all versions of Mac OS X system software as long as you are using the bash shell, which is the default in all modern releases.

Open the Terminal app found in /Applications/Utilities/

At a fresh bash prompt, hit the Escape key twice

You will see a message stating “Display all 1460 possibilities? (y or n)” type “y” key to start showing every command available

Hit the Return key to scroll through the huge list of commands available

Hit the “Delete” or backspace key to escape the command listing when finished

You’ll see a truly exhaustive list of commands available, some of which may be familiar to advanced users and many commands which even pro users likely have never seen or used before.

Of course you’re now probably wondering what each command might do, or how to investigate what the shown commands do. That’s easy as well.

Getting Info & Explanation for Each Terminal Command

You can easily retrieve information and an explanation on any of the shown commands by using the handy open man page trick, which will launch a manual for the chosen command into a new terminal window. Here’s how it works in the context of the all inclusive commands list on Mac OS:

Right-click on any command listed you wish to investigate and explain further

Choose “Open man page”

The manual page for the selected command will open in a new terminal window to explain the command

This will show you commands accessible to the shell, but there are more binaries for which documentation is available in other places, e.g. /usr/libexec. Moreover the manual page indexes are not always complete (the “apropos” command won’t always help you find what you need), and the documentation for many daemons is so utterly useless as to be completely absent (as, indeed, it often is).

And I just found out that in any terminal window — even one open for a long time — pressing TAB TAB also shows you the command list. FYI… I’m using Homebrew bash which is at version 4.4.12; must better than the default bash which is still at version 3.x.

Actually, Mac OS is the name of the operating system that has been around since the Mac debuted, though for a while they called it System.

For the modern era, and according to the Terminal command sw_vers, it’s called “Mac OS X” but I wouldn’t expect a newbie like Christopher who doesn’t know Macs or the command line and instead goes on the latest whims of a marketing team to know that. Oh I’m sorry, it’s not Christopher it’s christophER, obviously.

BTW, the Macintosh used “System” when it debuted until System 7.6 when they changed to Mac OS.

One other thing, ‘sw_vers’ needs to be updated, that’s the only reference to Mac OS X and its an error. Of course it was written in 2003. Use the System Information Utility for accurate software information.

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